Charles Darwin got it wrong,1 but his errors have become a central, and incredibly damaging, pillar of American Culture. The damage being done is in our face on a daily basis, told in daily headlines as the American, and, perhaps, the global story unwinds.
At the core of Darwin’s Theory is the postulate that organisms overproduce offspring. Producing more young than the environment can support leads to competition. Losers die. Survivors breed and the evolution of a population happens.
Aside from the voyage on the Beagle, Darwin spent most of his life as a gentleman farmer, raising domesticated livestock. His interests were primarily chickens and doves. Darwin’s “eureka moment” was the observation that hens, doves, cows, and sheep overproduce young. A hen, if the eggs are removed daily, might lay more than 225 eggs a year. That’s just way too many chickens.
In wild, undomesticated, bird populations there is not that sort of overproduction of eggs. Under normal circumstances, the American robin produces a clutch of 4 to 5 eggs. If you steal the first egg, she will work to produce a final clutch of 4 to 5. The number of eggs varies somewhat with the density of the surrounding population. Greater density means fewer eggs. Lower density means more. I’ve heard, but cannot document, that robins can be fooled into reducing clutch size by putting red-dyed cotton balls in nearby trees.
If density is high, resources might be low. Low resources might mean less energy to produce eggs, and it might mean less success in rearing young. There is a balance point between energy spent on eggs and energy lost in non-surviving offspring. For a robin under normal density, that works out to 4 or 5 eggs, more after a hurricane, fewer after a beneficent Spring.
In elephants, higher densities lead to delay of first offspring, longer offspring care, and fewer estrus cycles. If you move mammals into artificial, constrained environments, the results can be extreme. A prime example is a set of famous mouse experiments set in a “utopia” that yielded cataclysmic outcomes for the mice2,3.
The point of the last three paragraphs is that there is not a surplus of offspring available to naturally occurring populations. A further reduction in offspring is produced by the territorial demands found in most birds and many mammals. The establishment and marking of territories, by birdsong, chemical markings, or ritual combat absolutely limits the number of available offspring.
For an animal with only a few, large-investment offspring, a further limitation is imposed by bad luck; a nest blown out of a tree, falling into a river, or any other mishap. Bad luck is less of a factor for a salmon or a spider producing potentially many, low-investment offspring, most of which will not fully develop4.
Darwin was wrong. Population densities go up and down but in an unmolested, undomesticated environment, there is not a surfeit of offspring. There are just enough, no more, no less. To use energy to produce, raise, and protect offspring only to have them succumb to competition with other offspring would be thermodynamic foolishness. There is a dynamic balance between energy investment and energy loss through bad luck, and predation. It isn’t that competition never exists. It does, but it is not ubiquitous, ongoing, nor long-term. It is minimized and usually not determinative.
Darwin was a quiet, shy, guy not anxious to make a lot of noise about his theory. It was Herbert Spencer who made a lot of noise. He applied Darwin’s ideas to social systems. He coined the phrases “Survival of the fittest,” and “Nature, red in tooth and claw” and applied them in support of the racist, misogynistic, culturally domineering, white-male supremacist, British worldview. He postulated that laissez-faire economics, minimalist regulation, and unfettered individualistic competition would lead to the proper/ social and racial order.
Welcome to America. Laissez-faire economics, minimalist regulation, and unfettered individualistic competition is pretty much the American definition of “Freedom.” Spencer put Darwin’s errors on Steroids, and America, with apparently unlimited space, land, and resources, ate them up, and made them a core part of the dominant white, male, American Culture5. I cannot be sure, but I have never heard of, nor come across, any culture that has taken Social Darwinism to heart the way white, male, America has.
We are living with the results of the racist, misogynistic, culturally domineering, white-male supremacist, American worldview. War, climate chaos, genocide, amateur-level-fascism, Earth-system destruction, scavenger oligarchy, end stage capitalism, and trumpism, legal and illegal, can all be directly connected to an America in thrall to a Social Darwinism becoming more and more extreme over the last half-century. It is a potentially story-ending error.
The antidote to Social Darwinism has been set out and demonstrated by Mother Nature as the four Cs.
Commensalism – a dyadic relationship where both parties benefit without costs to either.
Cooperation – a communal effort to achieve a communal end or goal benefiting all.
Commons - holding the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable Earth, without privatization.
Community – a network of connections between people, places, things, and ideas that maintains and protects.
No, this not “Communism”. This is not “Socialism”. These are terms used and abused by Social Darwinists to protect themselves. The appropriate term here is, “Family”. Family is a story we know. Each is different. All are failures in some way. We all know what we would like but are not always sure how to get there. All we must do is agree you, me, us, them, and, maybe, even that, are family.
We can do so, must do so or, indeed, we do not deserve to survive as the city on the hill, a culture, a community, or, perhaps, as a global species.
1) Darwin was a brilliant scientist using hypothetico-deduction. The issues are with what he did not, could not, know and his point of view as a gentleman farmer.
3) https://thefreaky.net/john-calhouns-mouse-utopia-universe25/
4) For those with a good memory, this is the distinction between “r” and “K” strategists. It is a distinction with many shadings in between but it simply says some species go for high-volume-no-care while others go for low-volume-extensive-care.
5) Competition as the American bed-rock explanation for everything verges on rank stupidity, and a total misunderstanding of evolution. “Without competition, organisms would not evolve any meaningful physical or cognitive abilities.” https://www.nature.com/articles/srep13662
It's actually true that almost all animal species produce more offspring than are likely to survive to adulthood, because animal infant mortality rates are almost always very high. As just one example, only only about 1 in 8 lion cubs survive to adulthood. As another, a Giant Pacific female octopus can produce up to 50,000 hatchlings in one go, but only two or three of these will live long enough to reproduce.
A robin might only lay 4-6 eggs per brood, but they can have up to 3 broods in a year and they live, on average, 5-6 years in the wild. So, somewhere between 20 and 100 infants per female.
This is unsurprising since only 25% of robin infants make it past the first year and afterwards, the chance of surviving each additional year is only about 50%.
Social Darwinism has no logical connection to the biological theory of evolution. It's no more than a bad parody. It's quite easy to believe in biological evolution while rejecting Social Darwinism as a grotesquely immoral immoral travesty (examples include the current Pope and his predecessor).
Thank you for taking the time to put these thoughts into text. The challenge is having courage to act on what we know in our heart affirms life.